religions Article
Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa William I. Orbih Theology Department, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA; worbih@nd.edu
Abstract: The violence of missionary agents on Africans contradicted the gospel of Christ’s redemptive love, which they preached. In response to the contemporary manifestations of the violence and dehumanization of “colonial love”, this article proposes the decolonization of the gospel of love, both as theological hermeneutic and a moral imperative in the African Church. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus commands us to recognize every human being as a neighbor. Within a colonial context, this means rejecting the dualistic logic of colonial love, its segregation, dehumanization, and violence. Keywords: colonial love; Christ’s love; violence; colonialism; Christan ethics; Africa
1. Introduction
Citation: Orbih, William I. 2024. Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa. Religions 15: 519. https:// doi.org/10.3390/rel15050519 Academic Editor: Christopher Metress Received: 21 March 2024 Revised: 13 April 2024 Accepted: 16 April 2024 Published: 23 April 2024
Copyright: © 2024 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
This article studies how the violence of missionary agents against Africans effectively contradicted their gospel of Christ’s redeeming love, perverting, in the process, the power and beauty of love, which Christop Schwobel aptly describes as “a constitutive characteristic of Christianity”.1 As Weaner G. Jeanrond laments, “within the Christian movement, love has had a tainted history. Love has been invoked in order to punish children, to persecute non-believers, heretics, and revolutionaries, to exclude and even burn women who dared to challenge the patriarchal order in church and society” (Jeanrond 2010, p. 26). In much of the African continent, which was evangelized at the same time it was being colonized, what was proclaimed by the actions of the missionaries who shared the same “civilizing intent” with the colonial administrators can be best described as “colonial love”, which according to Carolyn Urena is founded on an imperialist dualistic logic and as such “dangerously fetishizes the beloved object and participate in the oppression and subjugation of difference”.2 Unlike Christ’s sacrificial and tender love, colonial love is pretentious, racist, dehumanizing, and violent. Located within and nourished by the logic of coloniality, it, in turn, embodies and perpetuates coloniality’s logic, which is essentially violent. Whereas Christ came so that we may have abundant life, colonial love segregates human societies, stifles human life, violates human bodies, and exerts domination on human groups. In response to what I will describe as contemporary manifestations of colonial love, I propose decolonizing the gospel of love as both a theological hermeneutic and a moral imperative in the African Church. Freeing the gospel of colonial entrapments energizes it to inspire a violence-free African continent, that is, among other things, a continent where the human dignity of the most vulnerable population is always respected. Using the parable of the Good Samaritan as a paradigm, I argue that Jesus’ “love your neighbor as yourself” commandment calls us to widen our horizons, which in practice, within a colonial context, means rejecting the dualistic logic of colonial love, its segregation and dehumanization, its violence, and its natural tendency to oppress. The background to this theological reflection on the essence and demands of Christian love is a historical account of missionary activities in colonial Africa via recourse to fictional and non-fictional resources.3 In addition to fictional accounts containing intricate details usually glossed over in non-fictional sources, as Chinua Achebe explains, fiction gives us “a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality” in a way no non-fiction can (Achebe 1988). Using both history and fiction thus aids me in emphasizing the many
Religions 2024, 15, 519. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15050519
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions